The light was not a star, and it wasn’t a dawn.
It was an upright wall of searing, blazing bright white soft glow, thirty thousand paces high and fifty leagues wide, sweeping across the unrendered void along the negative map point axis at terrifying speed.
Lin Tao halted on the star-iron narrow high walkway, his left eye narrowing as a cascade of red warning prompts flooded his sight display.
The Garbage Collector had arrived.
In any massive, distributed running system, unreferenced data objects—dead variables, leaked buffers, discarded spatial instances—piled up in memory over time. To prevent total heap tiredness, self-running garbage collection routines periodically swept across the memory sectors, identifying unindexed data and zeroing its memory addresses.
In the mortal world, high monks believed that once every twelve years, the Heavenly Dao performed a “Cosmic Cleansing” to purge evil spirits and lingering ghosts from the void.
In reality, it was simply a self-running sweep daemon executing a linear memory scan.
Anything standing in the open void that didn’t possess an active, registered royal tribute token or an official sky lease would be flagged as orphaned data and wiped from existence.
